The Masthead

About Polecat Press

A one-desk publisher of documentary comics built from the public record.

Polecat Press

Polecat Press publishes documentary comics drawn from the public record. We take a fight that already happened in the open, on paper, and we draw it so people will actually sit down and read it. Court files are tedious by design. A comic is not. That is the whole point. We find the stink, and we press it.

Citizen Skunk

The byline is a pen name, and it stays one. The work is built to stand on the record, not on a name. A skunk files its reports from the margins, keeps its head down, and lets the smell do the talking. The only thing worth arguing about is whether the footnotes hold up. They do.

Case No. 1: Skunked

The first file is Skunked: How a Tourist Train Seized a Coast. A tourist railroad on the Mendocino coast said it was a public utility, then went to court to seize private land to prove it. Over six years the fight ran through a county courtroom, a federal preemption suit, and the Surface Transportation Board, while the company quietly assembled a shuttered mill site and a long stretch of waterfront. Every panel is footnoted to the public docket.

Read the full record, with every source →

How it's made

The facts come from the public file: court rulings, agency dockets, recorded deeds, and the reporting that tracked the story as it happened. Every claim carries a citation, and the citations sit on the Record page so you can check them against the courts and the agencies yourself.

The pictures are drawn with AI image tools, art-directed panel by panel into the book's ink-and-halftone line. The drawing is just a way to make a dense legal record something a person will actually read. The record is what matters.

A note on the record

Skunked is editorial commentary in comic form, built on the primary public record. Dialogue from courtrooms and hearings is paraphrased from that record and footnoted on the page. Scenes without a citation are the author's interpretation, and are marked by the absence of a cite. All persons named are public participants in matters of public concern. The work has not been authorized by Mendocino Railway, the Skunk Train, the City of Fort Bragg, the California Coastal Commission, the Great Redwood Trail Agency, or any named individual.

Contact

Polecat Press, Mendocino Coast, California. Tips, corrections, and records: [email protected].